President Trump has long complained about voting by mail, which he has said could lead to “the greatest disaster in election history.” At the same time, Democrats on Capitol Hill have concocted a theory by which they accuse the president of crippling the Postal Service in order to slow the delivery of ballots and thus to steal the election.
In an Oval Office interview Wednesday, Trump clarified his views on the Postal Service and its role in the election. And he said flatly that the post office is not the problem.
“I think there’s more enthusiasm now than there was four years ago,” the president said in a discussion of his campaigning on the road. “The only thing I’m concerned about is the unsolicited ballots, where they’re going to send 80 million unsolicited ballots to people that they don’t even know if they’re alive or if they’re living there … I think it is a catastrophic disaster for this country.” The president brought up the primary election in New York’s 12th Congressional District, in which a relatively simple race took weeks to decide as election officials struggled to find, evaluate, and count ballots.
At that moment, I asked, “Your worries about that are not that the post office can’t deliver — “
“It’s not the post office,” Trump said. “No, it’s the elections office. The post office — look, this is a con job. It’s like the Russian hoax. The post office has run the way it’s been run forever.” New Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, the president added, will do a good job. “But the post office is the post office.”
The Postal Service delivers a mind-boggling amount of mail. According to its most recent annual report, it delivered 142.5 billion pieces of mail in fiscal year 2019. That’s 471 million per day, to nearly 160 million delivery points. This year, it delivered census forms and stimulus checks, which was an additional 450 million pieces of mail. A national presidential election would involve less than half of that, even if every registered voter voted by mail, which will not happen. In any event, the Postal Service can clearly handle mail-in ballots.
Assessing the Postal Service’s many problems, Trump spoke, as he often has, of the huge discount the post office gives to Amazon. “You want to solve the problems of the post office?” he asked. “All you have to do is charge a fair price for the delivery of a package.”
“But just to be clear,” I asked, “just on the ballots, you’re not worried about the post office’s ability to deliver them?”
“No,” Trump said. “It’s not the post office … it has nothing to do with the post office.” Even if mail delivery were “a day late,” Trump said, “that’s not the problem. The problem is when they dump all these [ballots] in front of a few people who are counting them, and they’re going to count them wrong. The post office is not to blame.”
Trump’s comments refined his objections to the 2020 election process. Not only is the Postal Service not the problem, the president said, neither is a vote-by-mail system in which voters request a ballot, which they then complete and mail to election authorities. The problem, as Trump sees it, is with “universal” vote-by-mail, which he calls “unsolicited ballots,” in which election officials send a ballot to every registered voter, who, as he suggested, might not still be alive or living at their old addresses. Trump believes that many ballots floating around creates a recipe for mischief.
There is much argument about whether that is a problem or not. But Trump’s words in the Oval Office added some much-needed clarity to the argument. No, he does not believe the Postal Service will impede ballot delivery. And no, he does not believe a system in which voters request ballots is by itself a problem. But he is emphatically opposed to universal vote-by-mail and has gone to court in some states to try to stop it. Whether he will succeed is unknown. But with accusations flying on Capitol Hill, the president’s new statements will at least give people some idea of what the debate is actually about.
